Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Grover Norquist at Human Events: Every Republican in the House and Senate agrees that Obamacare should be repealed and replaced with a consumer friendly, non-bureaucratic health care system. The question before Republican elected officials who have to vote on specific legislation and the conservative movement offering strategic advice is how to get from here to there.

The Hill: Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.) said she will introduce the legislation after Congress returns from a five-week break in September. ”As long as Obamacare remains law, members of Congress should not receive exchange subsidies that are not provided to other Americans,” she said in a statement.

AP: A conservative group is launching a radio ad challenging Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to refuse to fund President Barack Obama’s health care law even if it means triggering a government shutdown.

Mark Steyn at NRO: The Obamacare monstrosity blends all the worst aspects of a private system (bureaucracy, restricted access, co-pays) with all the worst aspects of a government system (bureaucracy, restricted access, IRS agents) and sucks up twice as much GDP, ever less of which is spent on “health care” and ever more on the intervening layers of third, fourth, fifth, and sixth parties.

Washington Post: Many cash-strapped cities and counties facing the prospect of shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars in new health-care costs under the Affordable Care Act are opting instead to reduce the number of hours their part-time employees work.

CNSNews: Asked Thursday if the Affordable Care Act will help “undocumented individuals,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said no — and that’s why immigration reform is so important . . .

Daily Mail: More than 1,600 new employees hired by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources in the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage include just two described as ‘consumer safety’ officers, but 86 tasked with ‘criminal investigating’ – indicating that the agency is building an army of detectives to sleuth out violations of a law that many in Congress who supported it still find confusing.

Washington Post: The Justice Department sued Texas on Thursday over the state’s voter ID law and will seek to intervene in a lawsuit over its redistricting laws that minority groups complain are discriminatory, but Texas Republicans insist are designed to protect the state’s elections from fraud.

Washington Examiner: Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., explained to a town hall of his constituents that he wanted to call a national Constitutional Convention after reading Mark Levin’s new book, The Liberty Amendments.

The Hill: Obama and senior administration officials are planning a teleconference with the managers of state-based insurance exchanges — new marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act where consumers can compare and purchase healthcare plans.

The Hill: “This is not about Obamacare. The state of Texas has been providing these types of services via Medicaid waiver for decades,” Perry spokesman Josh Havens said in a statement. “Additionally, this has nothing to do with expanding Texas’ Medicaid program. We do not support expanding Medicaid under Obamacare, and are not doing so here.”

AP: President Barack Obama on Thursday will unveil a sweeping new plan for rating colleges based in part on affordability, with the goal of eventually linking those ratings to federal financial aid awards.

TPM: Arizona and Kansas have taken Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s suggestion and sued the Obama administration in a continuing effort by both states to require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

Ben Carson at Washington Times: The Founders of our nation toiled long and hard to establish a government that was representative of the people. They actually designed a reasonably effective system, but over the years, significant metamorphosis has occurred, producing something that is quite dissimilar from their original intent.

Washington Post: Former senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that congressional Republicans who oppose the Defund Obamacare effort “should be replaced.”
“I’m not as interested in the political futures of folks who think they might lose a showdown with the president,” DeMint said at a Monday town hall hosted by Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, which DeMint leads.

Barna Group: While on the whole, Hispanics are more conservative than might be expected, one of the key findings of the research is a significant gap between U.S.-born Hispanics and foreign-born Hispanics. On almost all counts, U.S.-born Hispanics (including those born in Puerto Rico) are much less conservative in their social views than are those born elsewhere.

Townhall: According to a Forbes’ exclusive, an unpublished Congressional Research Service report reveals that Obama Administration has failed to meet half of the deadlines legally required by the Affordable Care Act.

USA Today: Estimates from 19 states operating health insurance exchanges to help the uninsured find coverage show that at least 8.5 million will use the exchanges to buy insurance, a USA TODAY survey shows. That would far outstrip the federal government’s estimate of 7 million new customers for all 50 states under the 2010 health care law.

Burnt Orange Report: Mary E. Gonzalez, who is the only openly LGBT legislature currently in office, is seeking re-election in her hometown of Clint. The other three LGBT candidates are Celia Israel and Michael Cargill who are running for the seat left by State Representative Mark Strama, (D-Austin), and George Clayton who is running for the seat left by State Representative Stefani Carter, (R-Dallas).

The Hill: “We don’t have time for the media’s games,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said before the vote at the RNC summer meeting in Boston. “We’re done putting up with this nonsense. There are plenty of other news outlets.”

Robert Costa at National Review: By late last week, House insiders say Boehner and Cantor had talked much of their conference away from the edge. “No one is advocating a government shutdown,” Cantor assured me on Friday.

The Hill: “Liberals want to bronco bust dissent. But Texans value speech, even if its speech they don’t agree with,” Stockman said in a statement. “From Molly Ivins to Louie Gohmert and every opinion between, Texans value free and open political speech. I’m sure any rodeo in Texas would be proud to have [the] performers.”

San Francisco Chronicle: If you happen to be one of the 400 million people who use Google’s Gmail service for sending and receiving emails, you shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy, according to a court briefing obtained by the Consumer Watchdog website.

The Hill: GOP Rep. Blake Farenthold (Texas) said House Republicans have enough votes to impeach President Obama, but warned the effort to remove him from office would be unsuccessful and could damage the country.

Kansas City Star: Fallout continued Monday over the performance of a rodeo clown who donned a mask resembling President Barack Obama during Saturday’s bull-riding competition at the Missouri State Fair.

The Hill: Santorum mocked the opinion of GOP strategists, the “pros who guided us so well through the last election” who have joined with Tea Party and libertarian Republicans who assert “we just need to talk about economics.”

The Hill: The poll, a part of Gallup’s Minority Rights and Relations survey conducted June 13 through July 5, indicates that 64 percent of Hispanics born in the U.S. to two U.S.-born parents were either Democrats or leaned that way . . .

AP: The fate of Democratic incumbents in GOP-trending Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina, the ability of the 71-year-old GOP leader to hold his Kentucky seat and the eventual outcome of a Georgia primary will help decide . . .

Glenn Greenwald at Guardian: A Texas-based encrypted email service recently revealed to be used by Edward Snowden – Lavabit – announced yesterday it was shutting itself down in order to avoid complying with what it perceives as unjust secret US court orders to provide government access to its users’ content.

The Hill: But those who insist the GOP must do everything it can to defund ObamaCare believe they can still win the day if enough grassroots supporters make their voices heard in the next several weeks.

Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy: The problem, however, is that moderate altruism combined with a low probability of decisiveness is not enough to incentivize most voters to acquire more than a minimal amount of knowledge about they’re voting on. Thus, we get an equilibrium where lots of people vote out of a sincere desire to promote the public interest, but most of them have very little understanding of which policies are actually likely to do that. This problem is the focus of my new book Democracy and Political Ignorance.

Washington Post: So, where does that leave us with the Affordable Care Act? Michael McConnell, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, has made perhaps the highest-profile argument that the decision was illegal. His case is that the employer mandate delay does more than show flexibility – it dispenses with law altogether.

Washington Post: There’s a lot of chatter today on Twitter about this video, which shows GOP Rep. Robert Pittenger of North Carolina getting prodded by Tea Partyers to say whether he will vote to defund Obamacare. Pittenger’s answer: A flat “No.”

U.S. News and World Report: As a poll last week by the Pew Research Center makes clear, however, Republicans overwhelmingly say that they want their party to become moreconservative. When it comes to Republicans, Republicans may be on to something: Conservatives don’t need to moderate so much as to choose. Modern Republicanism is a coalition of at least three different kinds of conservatism: the establishment, libertarians and social (or religious) conservatives.

Washington Post: The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations.

Townhall: By comparison, Congressman Ryan and Governor Walker (as well as a number of other Senate Republicans and state governors) seem to be taking a more nuanced approach. Of course, their objective is the same. But, they believe, delaying certain unpopular provisions of the law is almost certainly a more realistic and more popular way to do it.

NY Times: Cities and towns across the country are pushing municipal unions to accept cheaper health benefits in anticipation of a component of the Affordable Care Act that will tax expensive plans starting in 2018.

The Hill: The Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act passed 232-183 in a vote that went largely along party lines, hours before the House was to adjourn for its August recess. Under the bill, both chambers of Congress would have to sign off on any federal rules that carry an annual price tag of $100 million.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post: “Republican leaders are growing concerned by the fervor with which some members are demanding that Boehner defund the health care law as part of the government funding talks.”

CNSNews: Federal employees were paid more than $155 million of taxpayer dollars in 2011 for spending more than 3.4 million hours of “official time” on labor union activities that fell outside their assigned government duties, according to a survey by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Rare.us: My biggest surprise has been the defeatism among some Republicans here. There was such a strong sense of confusion about November’s loss, and many believed we had to retrench and there was no way to stop the president and Democrats from running the table. In my view, even in the Senate minority, Republicans can do three things. First, we can stop bad bills.

NCPA Policy Digest: Doctors are skeptical about the Affordable Care Act, and clueless, too. A new survey shows that an overwhelming percentage of physicians don’t believe that their states’ new health insurance exchanges will meet the Oct. 1 deadline to begin enrolling the uninsured, says CNBC.

Washington Post: Mitch McConnell is at least two things: A Kentucky senator running for reelection next year, and the leader of the Senate GOP Conference. It’s a combination that makes for same painful dilemmas.

Latest Posts

Family Studies: Last week, the New York Times chronicled the dramatic case of two babies switched at birth. Two decades ago, two mothers came home from a hospital in southern France with the wrong daughters. As the girls got older it became increasingly clear that they had little biological resemblance to their parents. Indeed, the father of one girl left her mother because he was suspicious of the girl’s origins.

Fox News: So you can imagine Jeff’s extreme displeasure when organizers of an Alabama barbecue competition ordered him – along with other competitors to take down the American flags hanging from their barbecue trailers.

Life News: For the second time in two years, pro-abortion West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has vetoed a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy on unborn babies who studies show can feel intense pain.